Kronos Still Vital at 50 Years Young

Despite the hip and mighty Kronos Quartet’s current season celebrating the big 5-0, there are plenty of new songs and artistic vitality left in its collective fiddle. As heard last Saturday in its “Kronos @ 50” concert at Campbell Hall, one of many UCSB Arts & Lectures presentations over many years, the group continues on its path as avatars of new music.

Founder and first violinist David Harrington remains the ongoing anchor of the operation, a deceptively soft-spoken power broker in the culture of not only Kronos but the new music universe going back to the late ’70s. The mission apparently remains strong, as heard in Kronos’s “50 for the Future” project — adventurous new quartet works available for free to any and all quartet-comers. From that catalog, Kronos played the viscerally juicy Little Black Book, by electronic musician Jlin, at Campbell Hall. (Hear it here).

In other new music from left-of-classical sources news, the concert burst open, after a summarizing KRONOS at FIFTY documentary by Sam Green, with the driving 7/4 charge of “The Black Art Book of St. Cyprian the Mage: V. Bruxa de Evora by Trey Spruance, of art-rocking band Mr. Bungle fame. In a performance-arty twist, Canadian idea man and father of “Plunderphonics,” John Oswald cooks up an amassing wall of sound with “Excerpt from Spectre,” while the quartet members end up mock-playing in freeze-framing. strobe-lit poses.

Socio-historical impact is the main takeaway in Zachary James Watkins’s Peace Be Till, with engaging musical dressing for a filmed piece based on MLK’s moving jailhouse letter, read by the Reverend’s speechwriter Clarence B. Jones.

The Kronos can strain a bit in unfamiliar genre territory, as when trying to swing on a version of Sun Ra’s “Kiss Yo’ Ass Goodbye” (arranged by cellist-composer Paul Wiancko) or playing to the cheap seats with their early novelty “hit” version of Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze” as the final encore.

But this variegated nine-piece program struck an inspired balance of qualities held dear over the Kronos years, including the meditative so-called “world music” sounds of Indonesian composer Peni Candra Rini’s Segara Gunung: Movement 1.

Aleksandra Vrebalov, a Serbian composer now based in N.Y.C. and a longtime Kronos collaborator, provided one of the concert’s highlights. “Gold Came from Space” is an emotional/structural journey, venturing from atonal, atmospheric space to tonal poise and bustling spirits, with a painterly attention to details and narrative arcing, sensitively rendered by the quartet.

One distinguishing mark of the Santa Barbara concert was its status as an official “retirement party” of sorts, the final public performance by retirement-bound veteran members Hank Dutt and John Sherba, viola and violin, respectively. While the Kronos cello chair has shifted over the years (Wiancko currently holds it), Dutt and Sherba have been old Kronos reliables for nearly the entire run — so far. New members have been lined up for the next Kronos phase.

But again, what could be a note of transition and graceful aging instead pumped up the conceptual heat and volume, with Nicole Lizee’s beautifully crazed ZonelyHearts (Lizee was also a featured composer at Kronos’s 2018 Campbell Hall show).

ZonelyHearts is a wild and sensorially trip into a distinctive surreal linkage of live performance, semi-animated video — sometimes featuring the members in playfully mutant form on screen — and a new flavor of interactivity between the elements. Visually, the funky and childlike sensibility recalls the Quay Brothers and such fantastical films as The Science of Sleep and the recent Problemista, while the musical score both embraces and satirizes new music attitudes.

As is their habit, the Kronos gamely played along with the composer’s intended dream circus, switching out their instruments for old school telephones, tiny plastic-eyeball-topped surrogate bows, and closely-mic’d Pop Rocks a-poppin’.

At 50, Kronos is still not your grandfather’s string quartet, and their Campbell Hall show qualifies as one of the high points of our musical season.